The 10th Annual Davies Awards in Film

There’s a film that was released in 2015 that hardly anyone is mentioning at year’s end. It’s a film that for fans of a certain type of old-school cinema…those who love noir, Lang, Hitchcock and The Third Man…soared wafting in on the summer breezes to art-house theaters like a fresh breath of cool lake air. And it features a singular performance (from the one and only Nina Hoss) and a closing scene, so haunting, so complete, so cinematic, so classy…it made those lovers of that refined kind of retro flick gasp. “We didn’t know they could make them like this anymore…” we communally thought. Oh, but they do…and it’s so very rare and precious when they do. Phoenix (and for the legions who haven’t seen it, please do…it’s currently streaming on Netflix and Amazon Prime) is the film of the year – hell, maybe of the decade. My wife and I loved it so much we had “Speak Low” play as one of our wedding songs. It’s that damn good. And unforgettable.

The theme of survival and revenge (and in the case of Phoenix, the simple act of surviving as the sweetest form of revenge) was, as is almost always the case, the dominant theme of the year’s most powerful films. In Tom McCarthy’s riveting and “matter of fact” Spotlight, we saw how when good people put in the hard work, the truth and justice will eventually prevail. Like Phoenix it offered hope in a grim world of human horrors. Meanwhile, in what may have been the year’s most brutal survival film (and also the most sumptuously photographed), The Revenant, Inarritu depressingly offers up some kind of perverse divine/cosmic justice in the face of human misery, provided Mother Nature doesn’t swallow you up first.

There was also Mad Max: Fury Road which, pardon the cliché, shot like a bat out of hell and scorched across cineplexes like the last mad gasp of society gone completely mad. It was a pop metal-death feminist empowerment fantasia fever dream that both evoked the past (if Furiosa isn’t the symbolic cinematic resurrection of Dreyer’s Joan of Arc come back to raise hell after the apocalypse, then well, I’ll eat my hat) and vomited a vision of the future that blistered itself onto viewers like a boil. It’s the polar opposite of Phoenix, but almost just as memorable, and in any other given year would’ve devoured every other movie in its path.

But when it came to pop culture reinvention, circling back to make everything old new again…Hollywood was on fire from the over-the-top artsy action of Mendes’ “way better than they gave it credit for” Spectre to the return of the Stars Wars franchise to its Saturday afternoon serial and screwball comedy format in The Force Awakensto the “I didn’t even know I liked Rocky movies!” fun of the uplifting Creed. Even in the quiet and lovely and mostly overlooked Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, mopey but endearing teenagers ghetto-crafted their own smart-phone era updates of classic films, and the scene where “Me” is writhing around on the floor while his mother scolds him with the theme from Vertigo playing in the background is the type of pop-culture mishmash (an homage to John Hughes and Hitchcock in the same scene?) that could only exist in this 21st century of constant recycling and sampling.

The images 2015 left behind were astonishing thanks to some of the best collective work in cinematography I can recall as an active amateur film critic. The greatest living cinematographer, Roger Deakins, just might have perfected his signature brand of nighttime photography to make the hard-hitting and nail-biting drug war saga Sicario brood. Meanwhile Emmanuel Lubezki (the world’s second greatest living cinematographer) was up to his usual bag of tricks with the dreadfully gorgeous winter scenery of The Revenant. John Seal delivered his best work since The English Patient and made a post-apocalyptic hellscape art in Mad Max: Fury Road. And let’s not forget those gorgeous Dorset hills photographed so splendidly by Charlotte Bruus Christensen (along with sunlight through Carey Mulligan’s locks) in Far From the Madding Crowd.

Another healthy trend included what may be looked back on as a watershed year for actresses from a legendary Hoss in Phoenix and iconic Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, to the headstrong Carey Mulligan in Far From the Madding Crowd, to “a star is born” performances from Brie Larson in Roomand Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, to the blunt Emily Blunt in Sicario, to the refined leading ladies of Todd Hayne’s Carol, women had some of the meatiest roles in ages and they relished in the opportunities (hell, even comedians like Amy Schumer got in on the game). I think I may have made similar claims in past years, but I really mean it this time. Really, I do.

And it was one leading lady who was roped into the year’s worst film, the un-releasable Serena, an unforgivably bad (and not only bad, but flat-out clueless and monumentally inept) adaptation of a great novel staring big, big stars (Jennifer Lawrence and Bradly Cooper) which sucked the life out of me for two hours. Sadly not everything in 2015 came up roses, and this dreck would have to be buried under two tons of the thorny things to get rid of the stink it left behind.